Finally....

Ok, so I missed the whole month of December. In my defense, it was a very busy month. All of the actual events were fun, but it was so much work preparing for each one. I've set a goal of making Christmas a more peaceful time next year. I want to be able to enjoy the Christmas season, instead of being filled with stress. I'm thinking no actual presents, just gifts of time and service. I don't want to be busy making a bunch of homemade gifts either, I just want to spend time with my family and friends and let them know how much I love them. That can't be such a difficult thing, can it?

Of course now that it's the very end of Christmas vacation, Logan and Steve are both sick. Logan seems to be on the mend, but Steve appears only to have made it from sleeping in bed all day to sleeping on the purple couch all evening. So instead of having a nice quiet house tomorrow with only Rowen and I, it may be the whole family hanging out all day. I guess it's a small price to pay for all the extra snuggle time I get with Logan when he isn't feeling well.

Rowen went to "big primary" today. I can't believe she's a Sunbeam. And what a different Sunbeam she is than Logan was. I watched Rowen from the doorway for about 15 minutes, and she was so good. She sat quietly in her chair with her arms folded. She just kept shushing Gabe. Logan still has a hard time sitting in his chair for all of Joint Exercises in Primary. And Rowen came home with the spotlight bag today. I'm more excited than she is. And what a sweetheart. I was asking her what she wanted to bring in her spotlight bag in the car on the way home. She of course said her Littlest Pet Shop and her ponies. And then she stopped. So I asked her what else. And she said she was thinking about all the people that she likes best and she started listing all of our friends and family. She said Cayden and Kenzie and Bailey and Ayden and Mommy and Logan and Daddy and Gramma and Grampa. I really hope Rowen gets to be a big sister someday. She would be so good at it.

We went and saw Despereaux on Friday. We also saw Bolt on Tuesday, but it wasn't anything great, so no real need to do any writing about it. But Despereaux I loved. It had such grownup themes, but all the kids loved it. It was about love and loss, courage and bravery, forgiveness and hope. I shall have to see it again when it comes out on DVD, especially because Rowen had to go to the bathroom twice during the movie. And of course, always at an crucial moment. But the characters were well-developed and you could see how hurt and loneliness can drive someone to be unkind and selfish and how one act of forgiveness can bring out the best in not only the one forgiven, but in the person who forgave them. It showed how great acts are never accomplished by one person alone, but by people willing to stand together and try their hardest. It was a beautiful little story. I shall have to get the book from the library and read it with Logan.

I've been reading some great literature lately. At the end of November I read Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. Thinking about it more than a month later still pulls at my heart strings. Jude (from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy) has some stiff competition for character dearest to my heart by Ralph Marvell. He was kind and good, intelligent and honest, gentle and hardworking. He wanted a life full of beauty and adventure and love and instead he ended up with a wife who was not only selfish, but was empty and vain, who had no redeeming quality at all. Her only goal in life was to be rich and beautiful and to be part of the most elite social circles. And she spent her whole life using and abusing every single person who came in contact with her. She didn't want to be rich so that she could travel to beautiful places or own amazing works of art to admire. She only wanted to be rich in order to be talked about and to be written up in the society pages. That was her only goal in life. Ralph gave her everything he had and when it wasn't enough for her, she walked away and left him without a backward glance. She ends the novel on her fourth marriage and already showing signs of disappointment in it. I previously thought that Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair was the most self-centered ruthless anti-heroine ever written, but at least she did have intelligence and she did have some genuine caring and moments of generosity to her friends. Undine Spragg has nothing. She has to be the most shallow character ever created. It still just seems so unfair.

I've been reading the short novels of Henry James this last month. They aren't so much as novels as character studies. They don't have great plots or even amazing characters. But the writing is fantastic. I really liked Washington Square, even more than I thought I would. His turn of phrase is incomparable. The stories are about such average people leading average lives, but his writing is captivating all the same.

Ok, I'd best get back to my kids now. But at least I got my first post of the year done.

~Jenn